Bees and Buzz, Honey and Magic

The next reader’s zoom call is May 24, 9:00 AM Pacific. Link at the end of the blog.

The first photograph of me, I am three months old, lying on a baby blanket in my baptismal dress on the lawn at my grandparents’ house. July, Montana, the buzz of bees pollinating raspberries and garden vegetables. My little body is stretched over summer-warmed grass.

I do not remember this in the comb of memory, but my body knows. Whatever ceremony has just occurred in the little Methodist church my grandfather stewards, the one occurring in this photo is the land itself binding me to this place.

That autumn, my parents will drive east to New Jersey where my father will continue post-War university studies.  I will spend my childhood in Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Minnesota. I will never reside in Montana, but the West will always feel like home, and the Baldwin family will long identify this homestead as its spiritual source.  What Jeannine Ouelette calls, “a cartography of self.”

The summer I am five, we take the train from Indianapolis to Great Falls so my father can work the honey harvest, and my mother can join the daughters-in-law putting up garden produce for winter. Here my Montana memories begin. Picking raspberries, running through irrigation water, sucking honeycomb, and bees. Bees. Bees. Finally allowed to ride out to the bee yards in the honey truck with my grandpa and an uncle, I watch them work hives amid the buzzing swirl.

On our way back to the homestead, one loose bee, caught in the truck cab, stings me on the hand. I remember the sharp pang of it, my howl of surprise. My grandfather plucks the stinger out and sucks my thumb to draw out venom— his hands a calloused tenderness, his lips a blessing. He tells me, “Brave girl, Chrissie, you’re a real Baldwin now.” I am carried into the kitchen, turned over to the women, baking soda applied to my sting. There is supper around a family table, ice cream on the porch steps. Stories float like pollen in the evening air.

If this sounds like origin story to The Beekeeper’s Question: it is.

Over ten years—with so many variations of story shifting into place—the constant was the vocation of Leo Cooper, a combination of Protestant theology in the human community and the “protestant ethic” of hard-working bees. I drew upon memory rising through the summer visits that immersed me in the family mythos. I created story out of my DNA—those mitochondrial snippets that fed a synthesis of personal history beyond my ken—and from hours spent watching bees in action—asking for their guidance.

I studied A.I. Root’s tome, The ABC & XYZ of Bee Culture, 1930 edition—the book my grandfather had propped on the bookcase next to his King James version of the Old & New Testaments. I read Tammy Horn’s BEES in America, How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation (University of Kentucky, 2005). I read The Hive, The Story of the Honeybee and Us (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2004) by Bee Wilson.

Honeybees were brought to America by early English settlers in 1620. “European colonists brought an agrarian philosophy that depended on cows and bees to extend and define an agricultural legacy inherited from classical Greek and Roman writers.”  (Let alone, Old Testament references to the land of milk and honey.) The Indians called them “white man stinging flies,” their arrival linked to westward press of colonization. And one of the cultural compatibilities that supported the horrific importation of Africans into American slavery was how deeply interwoven cows and bees were in many African societies.  “As long as settlers had cattle and bees, they could be assured of the basic essentials—food, wax, medicine, candles, and clothing.” (p19 Bees in America)

Bees came into the Baldwin family in 1915 when a neighboring farmer was drafted into World War I and offered his hives to my grandfather for the duration. The man lived, but wasn’t interested in the bee business after the war, so the operation became “Baldwin & Sons Beeline Honey.”  It grew to 500 hives spread out in a 50-mile radius that supported his eight children through the Depression and paid for college educations.

Homestead from the story

A lot of what Leo Cooper says in the story, comes from conversations with my father, Leo Baldwin, recalling his youthful years in Montana during his elder years living nearby.  He died in 2018, the book shaped enough that I committed to finishing it.

And then I came across Jacqueline Freeman’s profound gem, Song of Increase, Listening to the Wisdom of Honeybees for Kinder Beekeeping and a Better World (Sounds True Press, 2016) and was introduced to the shamanic aspects of beekeeping. See her interview with Seth Godin here. I wish I could have had these conversations with my dad.

A lot of what Maire Cooper experiences in the story comes from Jacqueline’s book, and The Shamanic Way of the Bee, by Simon Buxton (Destiny Books, 2004) which introduced me to the long lineage of Bee Priestesses, the Melissae. The interweaving of bees with Celtic shamanism was in Maire’s blood and in the story, Leo’s bees awaken that within her.

And then there’s Sara Leedom, a global storycatcher honoring the Indigenous ways of beekeeping. Sara showed up in my memoir class to write about her travels to remote honey hunters. While I stayed home and wrote, she attended international bee conferences, including one in England that brought her in contact with the Melissae.

So, there’s a lot to think about, and a lot to honor in the lineage of bees. On these warm May days, I’ve been greeting the bumblebees diving into my rhododendron blossoms and yesterday I parked by a bee yard just to listen to the hum. Wherever you live, watch for them, and watch out for them. And if you’ve read The Beekeeper’s Question, join the zoom and join the buzz. Here’s the link: Saturday, May 24, 9:00 AM Pacific.

If you have any trouble, contact: christina@christinabaldwin.com

May there be love and honey in all our days.